Bubba, The Sea Fern

           Bubba, The Sea Fern

             Bubba, The Sea Fern

In the great grand scheme of things, there really is nothing terribly funny about memory loss.  Early onset Alzheimer's, dementia of any sort or kind, aphasia, dysphasia, or, well, frankly, any type or sort or ilk of memory loss is nothing to be joked about.  These illnesses affect so many many people and cause so many struggles, and much grief, that I hope and pray that all you lovely neuropsychologists out there are studying and experimenting and coming up with solutions that can prevent, stave off, and eliminate these illnesses and problems for the entire human race.

That said, I shall take this time and opportunity to profess that I have become one of the few, the proud, the lost.  My memory leaks like a sieve. And although I would love to blame my memory loss on something clever and long-named, and on some sort of medical deficiency.  NOT because I WANT a clever, long-named sort of medical deficiency.  But rather because then I could blame it on something other than what it appears to be.  Alas, I cannot.  *Sigh.*  My memory loss evidently comes from, ugh, old(er), old(ish) age.

Not that I'm old, mind you.  I'm not even what I'd considered middle age.  Close, but not quite.  But alas, my memory is failing me.  Not the long term stuff, just the short term stuff.  The silly stuff like, oh, say, forgetting where I left my phone.  Or forgetting to buy the sour cream at the grocery store.  Those are the easy things I forget.  Not serious stuff like, oh, say, forgetting that I was supposed to pick up my son early from school.  On Thursday.  Each and every Thursday.  Nope.  Not like that.  Because that only happened the one time.  Yep.  Just the once.  And he only reminded me four or five times that morning, so you could almost blame him.  Almost.  But, well, not really.  Because honestly?  What kid wants to be blamed for the fact that his mom forgot to pick him up?  But in all reality, I actually DIDN'T forget to pick him up.  I just forgot what TIME I was supposed to pick him up.  See? Nothing to fuss over.  Just good, old fashioned, old age.  Yep. That's the stuff.  Poor kid.  He did forgive me though.  So that's something at least.

To compensate for my rapidly deteriorating short term memory, I started using the kitchen timer to remind me to do things.  Yay!  The timer!  So I set the timer, I zip off going about my day, and eventually the timer goes off, and I ... uh... what was I supposed to do?  No idea whatsoever.  Unless a pot of water is boiling in front of me, or a lovely aroma of cookies is emanating from the oven, the timer going off no longer does me any good.  So, I've had to come up with a new plan.

My iPhone!  The customized alarms I can create on my iPhone have saved my katookus more times than I can count.  I set them to go off at various times of the day.  One reminds me to leave at a certain time (in the red car) to pick up my daughter from school.  Another one reminds me to leave at a certain time (in the blue car) to pick up my son from music lessons.  I have others that remind me to go places, and what to do when I get there.  I can even set the alarm to go off every day, or every Thursday, or every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.  Whatever.  It's awesome.  Thank God for the iPhone!

But then there is this teensy weensy memory problem that just isn't solved with the iPhone alarm system.  It's my problem with words.  As I writer, and a talker (!), losing words has become a bit of a problem for me.  When I'm writing it's not as big of a deal.  The thesaurus works wonders. :)  So does asking my kiddos.  They're great at coming up with just the right word for just the right situation.  I just talk around the word I'm looking for -- describing it as best as I can, and my kiddos take turns trying to figure out what word I need.  Kinda like when I was in France, and I couldn't remember the name for a certain noun, and I'd describe the noun to the lovely French people whom I still love and adore to this day, using my best French adjectives and descriptors, and 9 times out of 10, they'd figure out exactly what I was trying to say.  The system works great.

Most of the time when I lose a word, or worse yet, mix up the words, they laugh and they help me figure out what I really mean.  So when I ask my son to put his shoes in the dishwasher, I'm pretty sure he knows his glass goes in the dishwasher, and his shoes go back up into his room.  But one of these days I'm going to find sneakers in my dishwasher's lower rack, and he'll say, "What?!? You asked me to put them there."  Sigh.

So back to Bubba.  (I always get there eventually.  I just like taking the circuitous route.)  This summer we went camping at the coast for a relaxing few days in the rain.  Our children nicknamed a lovely bird who came up to our picnic table and started begging for scraps.  They named him Birbing Birbingston.  He never got what he was looking for from us.  Poor fella.  I kinda felt bad.  Not bad enough to feed him (my food!  Mine! Mine! Mine!), but bad enough to feel, well, bad.  I'm a bit protective around my food.  Kinda like these guys...

My husband's travel coffee mug.  Bought it at DisneyWorld.  Perfect, no?

So anywhooooo, later that day when I dropped a cracker on the ground, I started looking around for the bird thinking maybe I could make his day.  My daughter asked me what I was looking for, and I said I was looking for Bubba.  You know, the sea fern.

They spent the entire rest of the camping trip making fun of me.  And Bubba.  The Sea Fern.

Bubba, The Sea Fern

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